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27Mar2011
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Readers: It is with deep regret that I am shutting the blog down until further notice. For a few moments, it was a pleasure. Thank you for being here with me. My blog will not allow any more comments after 24 hours from the posting of this blog.
Peace & Love…
Lastly, greed over a great story is surfacing from my “loyal”(?) readers. With all this back and forth about who owns what, that appears on my blog, let me reiterate that all material posted on my blog becomes the sole property of my blog.If you want to reserve any proprietary rights don’t post it to my blog. I will prominently display this caveat on my blog from now on to remind those who may have forgotten this notice.
Gratefully your blog host,
michelle
Aka BABE: We all know what this means by now :)
If you love my blog and my writes, please make a donation via PayPal, credit card, or e-check, please click the “Donate” button below. (Please only donations from those readers within the United States. – International readers please see my “Donate” page)
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Indigenous groups from across the US and Canada converged on DC in April to protest against the Keystone XL pipeline.
CREDIT: ALICE OLLSTEIN
As the U.S. Senate prepares to vote this week on a bill to force approval of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, which the House of Representatives already passed on Friday, American Indian groups who would be directly impacted by the tar sands project are converging on Washington D.C. to voice their opposition.
The Rosebud Sioux Tribe, whose territory in South Dakota lies along the proposed route of the pipeline, released a statement last week calling Congressional approval of the project an “act of war against our people.”
In a call with reporters on Monday, President Cyril Scott of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe vowed to fight back should the pipeline win government approval.
“Did I declare war on the Keystone XL pipeline? Hell yeah, I did,” said Scott. “I pledge my life to stop these people from harming our children and grandchildren and way of life. They will not cross our treaty lands. We have so much to lose here.”
Scott arrives in D.C. on Tuesday and plans to “rattle the doors” on Capitol Hill ahead of the evening vote. He said he hopes to draw special attention to the fact that the pipeline would cross one of North America’s largest fresh water sources, an aquifer that provides water for a full quarter of the nation’s farmland.
“I’m going to talk to every senator and anybody who will talk to me,” he said. “I will tell them, ‘It’s not a matter of if the pipeline will contaminate the Ogallala Aquifer, but when. And if you contaminate the aquifer, we can’t drink, we can’t grow crops. Where are we going to get our water, from Congress?’”
Besides the environmental threat of the pipeline, which Scott called an “atrocity against all humans,” the Rosebud Sioux say the U.S. government has not met its treaty obligations to ask the tribe for approval of projects that cross their territory. “The U.S. government does not consult us,” he said, noting that concerns brought to the Department of Interior and to the Department of State have been so far ignored. “We have a sovereign nation. We have our own constitution and laws here. But they violated my people’s treaty rights once again.”
Scott emphasized that the “war” he is declaring is a legal one, not a physical one. To bolster his tribe’s efforts, he is calling for a meeting of all the tribes in the Great Sioux Nation in the coming weeks. “When I was elected and took my oath of office, I said I would protect the next seven generations,” Scott told reporters. “I have that obligation not only as president, but as a warrior of the tribe.”
Native American activists across the US and Canada have been organizing for years to oppose the Keystone XL pipeline and other fossil fuel projects that threaten their land, air and water. O.J. Semans, a Rosebud Sioux tribal member with the voting rights group Four Directions, credits concern about the pipeline for boosting voting turnout by 5 percent this year compared to the last midterm election. “By participating in the process and electing individuals that understand our culture and protect our sacred land and water, natives can make a difference,” he told ThinkProgress.
But while tribal members make up 9 percent of South Dakota’s population, Semans acknowledged that they’re a constituency often ignored. “A lot of the voters in tribal country became a little upset because candidates don’t come around here until there’s an election,” he said. “They don’t work with us when they’re in office, just when they’re running for office.”
The Senate is scheduled to vote on the Keystone XL pipeline Tuesday evening. Party leaders note that the bill is just 1 vote away from the 60 votes needed to pass. John Thune (R-SD) is one of the sponsors of this week’s Senate bill to build Keystone XL and the state’s senator-elect Mike Rounds (R-SD) is a vocal supporter of the pipeline.
Semans said tribal members opposed to the pipeline have options both inside and outside the political process, including testifying before the state’s public utilities commission “about how destructive it is to our water,” suing the federal government for violating its treaties with tribe, and directly petitioning President Obama to reject the pipeline.
President Obama has suggested, but not confirmed, that he would veto the bill, but even federal approval could be stymied by courts and commissions in the states along the pipeline’s route.
Should all else fail, the Rosebud Sioux and eight other tribes in South Dakota have set up a “Spirit Camp” directly in the proposed path of the pipeline.
“We are using every alternative to protect Mother Earth,” said Semans. “We have been camped there for 6 or 7 months, and will stay until we get this resolved.”
When ThinkProgress asked about the difficulty of maintaining the camp through an abnormally frigid winter, Semans replied: “We’ll survive.”
*****
Readers: The Senate votes on this today. I’m not for it. The pipeline would pump oil from Canada, across American soil, and down into the gulf where it will be sold – it will have no affect on our gas prices. Yes, the pipline would create jobs but only temporary ones until it is complete. And then only 50 people would be employed permanently. That’s not much job creation.
“If my Republican friends really want to focus on what’s good for the American people in terms of job creation and lower energy costs, we should be engaging in a conversation about what are we doing to produce even more homegrown energy? I’m happy to have that conversation.” – Obama
I feel for and support the Rosebud Sioux. The Rosebud Sioux are not giving up. If you’re against this pipeline too, now is the time to voice your opinion and support the Sioux. They cherish their land and the health of the environment, and their people.
Unfortunately, like so many OTWs, they too are pushed aside and given little time until their votes are needed or until they want something for them…like the land they (whites) gave back to them, after they (whites) stole it from them. So much for a Treaty that really doesn’t mean anything, when it’s not being honored.
What else is new from the repubs? And it isn’t just the repubs. Some Dems are for this too. Sen. Mary Landrieu (D) is facing a re-election runoff against her repub rival in Louisiana in a few weeks. Funny thing is Landrieuis championing a Republican bill written by her Senate runoff rival!
Can it get any more crazy around here? Don’t answer that.
Thoughts? Blog me.
Howie: I apologize. You have shared personal information about you and Carr before – how you met, his two brothers etc. I was just curious, but it seems I may have offended you or was asking questions that were too personal. I understand. Please accept my apology. I HOPE you and Al are well.
Peace & Love…
Lastly, greed over a great story is surfacing from my “loyal”(?) readers. With all this back and forth about who owns what, that appears on my blog, let me reiterate that all material posted on my blog becomes the sole property of my blog.If you want to reserve any proprietary rights don’t post it to my blog. I will prominently display this caveat on my blog from now on to remind those who may have forgotten this notice.
Gratefully your blog host,
michelle
Aka BABE: We all know what this means by now :)
If you love my blog and my writes, please make a donation via PayPal, credit card, or e-check, please click the “Donate” button below. (Please only donations from those readers within the United States. – International readers please see my “Donate” page)
Or if you would like to send a check via snail mail, please make checks payable to “Michelle Moquin”, and send to:
Michelle Moquin PO Box 29235 San Francisco, Ca. 94129
Although I am calling today’s election day “Women’s Day,” because it is OUR day to make a difference, men need to get out and vote too. The more Dems at the polls the better chance we Dems have at winning, and making these last two years of the Obama administration successful.
At this point there is not much more to say. The voting part is easy. All you have to do now is go vote. And, help those that need help to vote.
June/Jane: You wrote me back in January informing me that you were a very successful female politician. I misread your comment and responded to you as “Jane” when you actually commented as “June.” Then you responded to me again, but this time signing off as “Jane.” :) Most likely you were being polite and not correcting me…and…the name you gave you mentioned was an alias so it probably didn’t matter :)
Well…This song is dedicated to you and all the women politicians that are working on securing women’s rights and equality, and bettering our political system so that women have power and a strong voice. I could not do what you ladies do but I applaud you and respect you so much for putting yourselves out there and being mentors and role models for our girls in the coming generations. I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your efforts, commitment and tenacity. And I support you wholeheartedly.
Let’s shake the tree and bring about change!
Waiting your time, dreaming of a better life
Waiting your time, you’re more than just a wife
You don’t want to do what your mother has done
She has done
This is your life, this new life has begun
It’s your day – a woman’s day
It’s your day – a woman’s day
Turning the tide, you are on the incoming wave
Turning the tide, you know you are nobody’s slave
Find your sisters and brothers
Who can hear all the truth in what you say
They can support you when you’re on your way
It’s your day – a woman’s day
It’s your day – a woman’s day
Souma Yergon, Sou Nou Yergon, We are shakin’ the tree
Souma Yergon, Sou Nou Yergon, We are shakin’ the tree
Souma Yergon, Sou Nou Yergon, We are shakin’ the tree
There’s nothing to gain when there’s nothing to be lost
There’s nothing to gain if you stay behind and count the cost
Make the decision that you can be who you can be
You can be
Tasting the fruit come to the Liberty Tree
It’s your day – a woman’s day
It’s your day – a woman’s day
Changing your ways, changing those surrounding you
Changing your ways, more than any man can do
Open your heart, show him the anger and pain, so you heal
Maybe he’s looking for his womanly side, let him feel
You had to be so strong
And you do nothing wrong
Nothing wrong at all
We’re gonna to break it down
We have to shake it down
Shake it all around
Souma Yergon, Sou Nou Yergon, We are shakin’ the tree
Souma Yergon, Sou Nou Yergon, We are shakin’ the tree
Souma Yergon, Sou Nou Yergon, We are shakin’ the tree
♥♥♥
Ladies: We don’t need to wait our time anymore and dream of a better life. It’s time to turn the tides in our favor. We are no one’s baby machine and nobody’s slave. There’s nothing to gain if we stay where we’ve been. Let’s make the decision, that we can change, inspire those around us, and be all we can be. Let’s taste the fruit of the Liberty and Equality tree, together. It’s OUR day – Women’s day.
Shakin’ the tree begins at the voting booth!
Howie: Thank you for encouraging my readers again to vote. I was also happy to see your comment in an effort to help Vivv and Adam.
Al, Zen Lill: Thanks for your encouraging words to get out the vote too, sans the repub vote of course – they can hang out on the couch all day and think smugly thoughts.
Joan: Thanks. In my opinion, I am just being logical, and looking at the facts. If some women can’t see the war on women that the misogynistic repubs keep presenting to them, there is no HOPE for them, as unfortunately I don’t think anything I can say will matter. I wish it did! Let’s just HOPE that enough women support women at the polls that it won’t matter, and we can pull them along with us to a better place for ALL of us. That is my goal.
Social Butterfly:) Thanks to you too for cheering on to vote! Thanks for the tip on voting. In addition to that I want to add that if you are a vote by mail voter and you decide to vote at your polling place tomorrow instead, you must turn in your ballot AND its envelope to a poll worker. If you cannot turn in both ballot AND envelope, you must vote provisionally.
If you want to know who the California Democratic Party is endorsing for 2014, click here.
GO VOTE!!
Thank you.
Blog me.
Peace out.
Lastly, greed over a great story is surfacing from my “loyal”(?) readers. With all this back and forth about who owns what, that appears on my blog, let me reiterate that all material posted on my blog becomes the sole property of my blog.If you want to reserve any proprietary rights don’t post it to my blog. I will prominently display this caveat on my blog from now on to remind those who may have forgotten this notice.
Gratefully your blog host,
michelle
Aka BABE: We all know what this means by now :)
If you love my blog and my writes, please make a donation via PayPal, credit card, or e-check, please click the “Donate” button below. (Please only donations from those readers within the United States. – International readers please see my “Donate” page)
Or if you would like to send a check via snail mail, please make checks payable to “Michelle Moquin”, and send to:
Michelle Moquin PO Box 29235 San Francisco, Ca. 94129
The comments referring to Al and the article that he posted inspired me to post this write. If you don’t think other republicans think the same same way, you are very mistaken, and up for a rude awakening. Vote the racist and sexist repubs OUT. Your chance to do that is NOW. Don’t miss out.
Think white privilege doesn’t exist in America? Consider just how much the color of a child’s skin changes his or her odds of escaping poverty later in life.
Roughly 16 percent of white children born into the poorest one-fifth of U.S. families will rise to become a member of the top one-fifth by the time they turn 40 years old, according to a new study by Brookings Institution researchers for the Boston Federal Reserve.
Those are fairly bleak odds, but for poor black children the odds of making it to the top are even longer: Only 3 percent of black children born into the poorest one-fifth of families will ever make the leap to the top income group, according to the study.
Even if they don’t always make it to the top of the income ladder, poor whites escape the worst forms of poverty more often than poor blacks. Only 23 percent of poor white children will still be counted among the poorest Americans when they turn 40, while a whopping 51 percent of poor black children will, the researchers found.
This chart shows the social mobility levels for white Americans. The horizontal axis shows where families start out on the income ladder, and the vertical axis shows the percentage of children from those families that end up at each income level by the age of 40.
As you can see, the poorest white Americans have a decent shot of ending up in a higher tier than their parents — 58 percent of white children from the poorest families end up in one of the top three income brackets.
But for black Americans, escaping poverty is far more difficult:
Just 22 percent of the poorest black children manage to get into the top three income brackets by the time they are 40. And note that there aren’t even enough black families in the top income bracket to do statistically significant analysis.
Where you start in life financially matters a lot, too: If you’re born in the poorest 20 percent of families of any race, yet still earn a college degree, you have roughly the same chance of being stuck in the poorest bracket as rich high-school dropouts do of staying in the richest bracket (16 and 14 percent, respectively).
Upward mobility is a much harder climb than it would seem.
*****
Readers: You think upward mobility is tough now. Put the repubs in charge and you’ll experience just how tough it can really be (since they don’t seem to think “white privilege” even exists! – yeah right. They’re just racist and choose not to see. You know nothing will get done to with that kind of thinking)
Or…do the smart, logical thing and ensure the Dems are successful and experience just how much more Obama can really do for you…for everyone. The choice is yours. Your future lies in your hands, and how you mark that ballot. I trust you’ll do the smart, logical, right thing, that is best for our country.
Blog me.
Peace out.
Lastly, greed over a great story is surfacing from my “loyal”(?) readers. With all this back and forth about who owns what, that appears on my blog, let me reiterate that all material posted on my blog becomes the sole property of my blog.If you want to reserve any proprietary rights don’t post it to my blog. I will prominently display this caveat on my blog from now on to remind those who may have forgotten this notice.
Gratefully your blog host,
michelle
Aka BABE: We all know what this means by now :)
If you love my blog and my writes, please make a donation via PayPal, credit card, or e-check, please click the “Donate” button below. (Please only donations from those readers within the United States. – International readers please see my “Donate” page)
Or if you would like to send a check via snail mail, please make checks payable to “Michelle Moquin”, and send to:
Michelle Moquin PO Box 29235 San Francisco, Ca. 94129
Naomi, Patricia, Janet: I saw 60 minutes too last night. I was so disgusted by these companies making so much money by taking advantage of people and their emotions…people that are dying from cancer and desperate to live.
Great suggestion to post this writeJanet. Thank you. Here is the segment and the script from 60-minutes:
Lesley Stahl discovers the shock and anxiety of a cancer diagnosis can be followed by a second jolt: the astronomical price of cancer drugs
The following is a script of “The Cost of Cancer Drugs” which aired on Oct. 5, 2014. Lesley Stahl is the correspondent. Richard Bonin, producer.
Cancer is so pervasive that it touches virtually every family in this country. More than one out of three Americans will be diagnosed with some form of it in their lifetime. And as anyone who’s been through it knows, the shock and anxiety of the diagnosis is followed by a second jolt: the high price of cancer drugs.
They are so astronomical that a growing number of patients can’t afford their co-pay, the percentage of their drug bill they have to pay out-of-pocket. This has led to a revolt against the drug companies led by some of the most prominent cancer doctors in the country.
Dr. Leonard Saltz: We’re in a situation where a cancer diagnosis is one of the leading causes of personal bankruptcy.
Dr. Leonard Saltz is chief of gastrointestinal oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering, one of the nation’s premier cancer centers, and he’s a leading expert on colon cancer.
Lesley Stahl: So, are you saying, in effect, that we have to start treating the cost of these drugs almost like a side effect from cancer?
Dr. Leonard Saltz: I think that’s a fair way of looking at it. We’re starting to see the term “financial toxicity” being used in the literature. Individual patients are going into bankruptcy trying to deal with these prices.
“I do worry that people’s fear and anxiety’s are being taken advantage of.”
Lesley Stahl: The general price for a new drug is what?
Dr. Leonard Saltz: They’re priced at well over $100,000 a year.
Lesley Stahl: Wow.
Dr. Leonard Saltz: And remember that many of these drugs, most of them, don’t replace everything else. They get added to it. And if you figure one drug costs $120,000 and the next drug’s not going to cost less, you’re at a quarter-million dollars in drug costs just to get started.
Lesley Stahl: I mean, you’re dealing with people who are desperate.
Dr. Leonard Saltz: I do worry that people’s fear and anxiety’s are being taken advantage of. And yes, it costs money to develop these drugs, but I do think the price is too high.
The drug companies say it costs over a billion dollars to bring a new drug to market, so the prices reflect the cost of innovation.
The companies do provide financial assistance to some patients, but most people aren’t eligible. So many in the middle class struggle to meet the cost of their co-payments. Sometimes they take half-doses of the drug to save money. Or delay getting their prescriptions refilled.
Dr. Saltz’s battle against the cost of cancer drugs started in 2012 when the FDA approved Zaltrap for treating advanced colon cancer. Saltz compared the clinical trial results of Zaltrap to those of another drug already on the market, Avastin. He says both target the same patient population, work essentially in the same way. And, when given as part of chemotherapy, deliver the identical result: extending median survival by 1.4 months, or 42 days.
Dr. Leonard Saltz: They looked to be about the same. To me, it looked like a Coke and Pepsi sort of thing.
Then Saltz, as head of the hospital’s pharmacy committee, discovered how much it would cost: roughly $11,000 per month, more than twice that of Avastin.
60 MINUTES OVERTIME
THE “EYE POPPING” COST OF CANCER DRUGS
Lesley Stahl: So $5,000 versus $11,000. That’s quite a jump. Did it have fewer side effects? Was it less toxic? Did it have…
Dr. Leonard Saltz: No…
Lesley Stahl: …something that would have explained this double price?
Dr. Leonard Saltz: If anything, it looked like there might be a little more toxicity in the Zaltrap study.
He contacted Dr. Peter Bach, Sloan Kettering’s in-house expert on cancer drug prices.
Lesley Stahl: So Zaltrap. One day your phone rings and it’s Dr. Saltz. Do you remember what he said?
Dr. Peter Bach: He said, “Peter, I think we’re not going to include a new cancer drug because it costs too much.”
Lesley Stahl: Had you ever heard a line like that before?
Dr. Peter Bach: No. My response was, “I’ll be right down.”
Lesley Stahl: You ran down.
Dr. Peter Bach: I think I took the elevator. But yes, exactly.
Bach determined that since patients would have to take Zaltrap for several months, the price tag for 42 days of extra life would run to nearly $60,000. What they then decided to do was unprecedented: reject a drug just because of its price.
Dr. Peter Bach: We did it for one reason. Because we need to take into account the financial consequences of the decisions that we make for our patients. Patients in Medicare would pay more than $2,000 a month, themselves, out-of-pocket, for Zaltrap. And that that was the same as the typical income every month for a patient in Medicare.
Lesley Stahl: The co-pay.
Dr. Peter Bach: Right. 20 percent. Taking money from their children’s inheritance, from the money they’ve saved. We couldn’t in good conscience say, “We’re going to prescribe this more expensive drug.”
“It was a shocking event. Because it was irrefutable evidence that the price was a fiction.”
And then they trumpeted their decision in the New York Times. Blasting what they called “runaway cancer drug prices,” it was a shot across the bow of the pharmaceutical industry and Congress for passing laws that Bach says allow the drug companies to charge whatever they want for cancer medications.
Dr. Peter Bach: Medicare has to pay exactly what the drug company charges. Whatever that number is.
Lesley Stahl: Wait a minute, this is a law?
Dr. Peter Bach: Yes.
Lesley Stahl: And there’s no negotiating whatsoever with Medicare?
Dr. Peter Bach: No.
Another reason drug prices are so expensive is that according to an independent study, the single biggest source of income for private practice oncologists is the commission they make from cancer drugs. They’re the ones who buy them wholesale from the pharmaceutical companies, and sell them retail to their patients. The mark-up for Medicare patients is guaranteed by law: the average in the case of Zaltrap was 6 percent.
Dr. Leonard Saltz: What that does is create a very substantial incentive to use a more expensive drug, because if you’re getting 6 percent of $10, that’s nothing. If you’re getting 6 percent of $10,000 that starts to add up. So now you have a real conflict of interest.
But it all starts with the drug companies setting the price.
Dr. Peter Bach: We have a pricing system for drugs which is completely dictated by the people who are making the drugs.
Lesley Stahl: How do you think they’re deciding the price?
Dr. Peter Bach: It’s corporate chutzpah.
Lesley Stahl: We’ll just raise the price, period.
Dr. Peter Bach: Just a question of how brave they are and how little they want to end up in the New York Times or on 60 Minutes.
That’s because media exposure, he says, works! Right after their editorial was published, the drug’s manufacturer, Sanofi, cut the price of Zaltrap by more than half.
Dr. Peter Bach: It was a shocking event. Because it was irrefutable evidence that the price was a fiction. All of those arguments that we’ve heard for decades, “We have to charge the price we charge. We have to recoup our money. We’re good for society. Trust us. We’ll set the right price.” One op-ed in the New York Times from one hospital and they said, “Oh, okay, we’ll charge a different price.” It was like we were in a Turkish bazaar and…
Lesley Stahl: What do you mean?
Dr. Peter Bach: They said, “This carpet is $500″ and you say, “I’ll give you $100.” And the guy says, “Okay.” They set it up to make it highly profitable for doctors to go for Zaltrap instead of Avastin. It was crazy!
But he says it got even crazier when Sanofi explained the way they were changing the price.
Dr. Peter Bach: They lowered it in a way that doctors could get the drug for less. But patients were still paying as if it was high-priced.
Lesley Stahl: Oh, come on.
Dr. Peter Bach: They said to the doctor, “Buy Zaltrap from us for $11,000 and we’ll send you a check for $6,000.” Then you give it to your patient and you get to bill the patient’s insurance company as if it cost $11,000. So it made it extremely profitable for the doctors. They could basically double their money if they use Zaltrap.
“High cancer drug prices are harming patients because either you come up with the money, or you die.”
All this is accepted industry practice. After about six months, once Medicare and private insurers became aware of the doctor’s discount, the price was cut in half for everyone.
John Castellani: The drug companies have to put a price on a medicine that reflects the cost of developing them, which is very expensive and takes a long period of time, and the value that it can provide.
John Castellani is president and CEO of PhRMA, the drug industry’s trade and lobbying group in Washington.
Lesley Stahl: If you are taking a drug that’s no better than another drug already on the market and charging twice as much, and everybody thought the original drug was too much…
John Castellani: We don’t set the prices on what the patient pays. What a patient pays is determined by his or her insurance.
Lesley Stahl: Are you saying that the pharmaceutical company’s not to blame for how much the patient is paying? You’re saying it’s the insurance company?
John Castellani: I’m saying the insurance model makes the medicine seem artificially expensive for the patient.
He’s talking about the high co-pay for cancer drugs. If you’re on Medicare, you pay 20 percent.
Lesley Stahl: Twenty percent of $11,000 a month is a heck of a lot more than 20 percent of $5,000 a month.
John Castellani: But why should it be 20 percent instead of five percent?
Lesley Stahl: Why should it be $11,000 a month?
John Castellani: Because the cost of developing these therapies is so expensive.
Lesley Stahl: Then why did Sanofi cut it in half when they got some bad publicity?
John Castellani: I can’t respond to a specific company.
Sanofi declined our request for an interview, but said in this email that they lowered the price of Zaltrap after listening “to early feedback from the oncology community and … To ensure affordable choices for patients…”
Dr. Hagop Kantarjian: High cancer drug prices are harming patients because either you come up with the money, or you die.
Hagop Kantarjian chairs the department of leukemia at MD Anderson in Houston. Inspired by the doctors at Sloan Kettering, he enlisted 119 of the world’s leading leukemia specialists to co-sign this article about the high price of drugs that don’t just add a few weeks of life, but actually add years, like Gleevec.
It treats CML, one of the most common types of blood cancer that used to be a death sentence, but with Gleevec most patients survive for 10 years or more.
60 MINUTES: SEGMENT EXTRAS
NAT’L ONCOLOGISTS GROUP TACKLES SPIRALING DRUG COSTS
Dr. Hagop Kantarjian: This is probably the best drug we ever developed in cancer.
Lesley Stahl: In all cancers?
Dr. Hagop Kantarjian: So far. And that shows the dilemma, because here you have a drug that makes people live their normal life. But in order to live normally, they are enslaved by the cost of the drug. They have to pay every year.
Lesley Stahl: You have to stay on it. You have to keep taking it.
Dr. Hagop Kantarjian: You have to stay on it indefinitely.
Gleevec is the top selling drug for industry giant Novartis, bringing in more than $4 billion a year in sales. $35 billion since the drug came to market. There are now several other drugs like it. So, you’d think with the competition, the price of Gleevec would have come down.
Dr. Hagop Kantarjian: And yet, the price of the drug tripled from $28,000 a year in 2001 to $92,000 a year in 2012.
“They are making prices unreasonable, unsustainable and, in my opinion, immoral.”
Lesley Stahl: Are you saying that the drug companies are raising the prices on their older drugs.
Dr. Hagop Kantarjian: That’s correct.
Lesley Stahl: Not just the new ones. So, you have a new drug that might come out at a $100,000, but they are also saying the old drugs have to come up to that price, too?
Dr. Hagop Kantarjian: Exactly. They are making prices unreasonable, unsustainable and, in my opinion, immoral.
When we asked Novartis why they tripled the price of Gleevec, they told us, “Gleevec has been a life-changing medicine … When setting the prices of our medicines we consider … the benefits they bring to patients … The price of existing treatments and the investments needed to continue to innovate…”
[Dr. Hagop Kantarjian: This is quite an expensive medication.]
Dr. Kantarjian says one thing that has to change is the law that prevents Medicare from negotiating for lower prices.
Dr. Hagop Kantarjian: This is unique to the United States. If you look anywhere in the world, there are negotiations. Either by the government or by different regulatory bodies to regulate the price of the drug. And this is why the prices are 50 percent to 80 percent lower anywhere in the world compared to the United States.
Lesley Stahl: 50 percent to 80 percent?
Dr. Hagop Kantarjian: 50 percent to 80 percent.
Lesley Stahl: The same drug?
Dr. Hagop Kantarjian: Same drug. American patients end up paying two to three times more for the same drug compared to Canadians or Europeans or Australians and others.
Lesley Stahl: Now, Novartis, which makes Gleevec, says that the price is fair because this is a miracle drug. It really works.
Dr. Hagop Kantarjian: The only drug that works is a drug that a patient can afford.
The challenge, Dr. Saltz at Sloan Kettering says, is knowing where to draw the line between how long a drug extends life and how much it costs.
Lesley Stahl: Where is that line?
Dr. Leonard Saltz: I don’t know where that line is, but we as a society have been unwilling to discuss this topic and, as a result, the only people that are setting the line are the people that are selling the drugs.
*****
Robert I: Nice to see a comment from you. Thanks for continuing the cancer conversation by adding in some really important information that people need to know. I am familiar with the cholesterol levels being lowered every year. I have been trying to find a good write about that to post. It’s crazy and sickening how big pharma is in bed with the doctors, the ones who are supposed to care about our health, and they are basically making money by taking advantage of people wanting to live.
Readers: Between thugs with guns and greedy doctors, we can’t seem to rely on people whose jobs are supposed to be caring for our well-being. But what we can rely on is our own voice and our vote. What I wish for everyone to know is that their vote does count. We see it time and time again, how when we don’t exercise our right to vote, at best, we give our power to those that don’t have our best interest in mind, and at worst, they simply don’t care because money is more important. In case you’re wondering whom I am speaking of, it is the repub party.
Why would anyone let someone else control their livelihood, well-being, body…whatever? I certainly am not handing over that power. I encourage you to do the same and make sure that your friends and family are on board too. I can’t stress it enough and if you’re tired of me saying it…well, too bad – let’s do it so I don’t have to say it anymore. Make your voice heard. Make your vote count. Take your power back. VOTE THIS NOVEMBER.
Lucy, ST, Evelyn: I found that segment fascinating as well. And I loved that part about the dog’s eyes too. I have always connected with Lucy through her eyes and I just can’t seem to give her enough kisses throughout the day. But learning that “When dogs are looking at you they are essentially hugging you with their eyes,” really left me with such a sweet, warm feeling. I am now looking at Lucy a little differently.
I love this photo of Lucy with her “Chewy Vuitton” shoe given to her by my sister-in-law. :)
♥♥♥
Peace & Love…
Lastly, greed over a great story is surfacing from my “loyal”(?) readers. With all this back and forth about who owns what, that appears on my blog, let me reiterate that all material posted on my blog becomes the sole property of my blog.If you want to reserve any proprietary rights don’t post it to my blog. I will prominently display this caveat on my blog from now on to remind those who may have forgotten this notice.
Gratefully your blog host,
michelle
Aka BABE: We all know what this means by now :)
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